


An All Right Kind of Day

by telm_393



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Caretaking, Friendship, Gen, Heavy Angst, Mental Breakdown, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-14 13:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16041245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Gaby, Napoleon, Illya, and their mess of a home.





	An All Right Kind of Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> This is the first fic I've written for this fandom, and thank you, recip, for getting me to watch this movie! I really hope you enjoy the fic.

Gaby lived in Napoleon’s apartment while they were looking for Illya. She didn’t move in on purpose and it wasn’t meant to be forever, they were just so wrapped up in trying to find Illya that they never seemed to have a reason to spend time apart, and Napoleon’s apartment was bigger.

Besides, it was nice to have Napoleon there when Gaby inevitably woke up terrified that he was gone too and she was really alone this time, and there were plenty of nights she got woken up by Napoleon walking into her room to check if she was still there.

They still assumed that once they got Illya back, things would be as they were before; they would be comfortable with the team all back together, and she’d move back into her apartment and Illya into his and it’d be business as usual after he recovered from whatever was being done to him.

They never considered that it wouldn’t be a question of _when,_ but _if,_ right up until they actually got Illya back. Soon after that they moved into what used to be a safehouse, about an hour’s drive from headquarters, because they needed more space. Space away from the city, away from the threat of civilians, or the threat of Illya encountering civilians at a bad moment.

It was always a little funny to Gaby, seeing the sweet little place they called home, with its robin’s egg blue paint job and white trim and white porch and white picket fence, standing out like a sore thumb in the middle of nowhere.

Once, she and Napoleon stood next to each other while Illya was sleeping, doped up on horse tranquilizers because at that point he was still weak enough for them to force medicine down his throat, and contemplated the facade for nearly an hour. Well, Napoleon did. Gaby, for her part, was practically asleep with her eyes open, and only snapped back to reality when Napoleon said of the house, with the air of an art critic who wasn't entirely convinced by what he was seeing, “It certainly hides a multitude of sins.”

She’d paused, taken in the words, and then burst out laughing. “I can’t believe you just said that! And with a straight face!”

Napoleon had looked offended for a second, but then he’d laughed too.

+

They got back from a mission to Paris—a quick in and out to pinpoint the exact locations of THRUSH’s next few terror attacks, and a bit of wetwork at the end there too—a couple of days ago, and it was a nice break. The whole thing went off without a hitch, of course, because it didn't matter if their work responsibilities had shifted a bit, they were still U.N.C.L.E.’s oldest and best team.

Then they got home, and that wasn’t quite as simple.

Neither Gaby or Napoleon could ever quite put their finger on what upset Illya so much about getting back from what Napoleon, who never seemed to stop thinking he was funny, liked to call ‘destination ops’, but they both knew Illya was going to be worse than usual for a few days. Maybe it was to make up for how much better he was when he was on the job, though that was a delicate balance too.

Illya’d had the breakdown he hadn’t yet recovered from while working, see, some weeks after he was cleared to go back into the field because his fever had broken and he was fine, he really seemed like he was doing just fine—

Gaby preferred not to think about it.

It probably all came down to exhaustion in the end.

Exhaustion was something Gaby understood. The other night she hadn’t been able to even get upstairs before falling sound asleep on the living room couch. Her own room wasn’t all that welcoming anyway, since it had recently gotten a dresser half-embedded in the wall. In any case, her decision the night before to sit down on the couch and just rest her eyes a bit meant that the sound of Napoleon moving around the kitchen woke her even sooner than it would’ve had she been upstairs in her bed. She wasn’t going to get back to sleep, she decided when she woke, so she got up because there was nothing else she could think to do.

Gaby pushed the splintered leg of a broken chair out of the way with her slippered foot as she picked her way across the living room and into the kitchen, where Napoleon was measuring ingredients for whatever “culinary masterpiece” he’d decided to make them that day. 

He looked up for just a second when Gaby came in and gave her a brief smile before going back to pouring either sugar or salt into a cheap plastic measuring cup—his old cup had been glass, and it'd barely lasted a week before getting destroyed during of one of Illya’s outbursts. It just barely missed Napoleon’s head, too. He was flippant about it, of course, told them that a measuring cup didn’t work any better or worse just because it cost a lot of money. He could still cook, and that was the important part. 

Napoleon enjoyed cooking with an intensity that bordered on desperation, as though there was nothing more important in the world than to achieve the perfect balance of garlic and salt, and maybe sometimes there wasn't, not for him, not with Gaby “hoarding” the case files Waverly sent them to consult on between jobs. That's what Napoleon accused her of doing, at least, and she admitted it, and didn't stop.

“Everyone likes to feel useful,” Illya told Gaby once, back when he was more himself, or a different kind of himself, and though she could never quite remember what they'd been talking about at the time, the words always came back to her at the most mundane moments.

She wasn't judging him for it, though. Of all the things that made Napoleon feel useful, Gaby was glad that cooking topped the list. They had to eat, and Napoleon was the only one who could cook at all. Gaby was rubbish at it. So was Illya, for that matter, and she figured that that was one thing that hadn’t changed.

Maybe Napoleon also liked making dishes from all over the world because he felt cooped up with more space between ‘real’ jobs and so much time at home. No one could blame them if it drove them all a little stir-crazy, especially when they couldn't really leave the house at all for a while after getting back from a job, not even to go to headquarters, when usually even Illya could put in a couple of visits a week for appearances at least.

No one wanted to entertain the possibility of Illya having a fit at HQ or of only Gaby or Napoleon being there with him or, worse, of him being alone if he had a particularly nasty outburst, and everyone who knew anything was aware that it wasn’t just probable that he’d have a “particularly nasty outburst” after getting back from a job, it was impossible that he wouldn’t. In the end, they just had to wait for him to get the worst of the worst of it out of his system.

(“Can’t have the younger agents seeing what he’s come to,” Napoleon told Gaby once with a sneer. “The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed ones, I mean. They have a choice in being here. They see what can happen to the agency’s very best…well, some of them might make the sensible choice and get the hell out.”)

 _Predictably unpredictable,_ Napoleon called Illya’s behavior back when Illya was well, or as well as Gaby had ever known him, and it was still true. Gaby could never know how good or passable or bad things would be until she saw Illya, though she hoped he’d already gotten his more spectacular post-job breakdown out last night when her room had been the latest casualty in his ongoing attempt to tear the entire house to pieces.

But she couldn’t know. She couldn't know when things would get better. Still, she managed, she and Napoleon and Illya.

It even had its upsides, the whole sorry mess, or at least she found some, since she had the time. The best part was that it made it so much harder to focus on her own pain, or for Napoleon to focus on his, because for every day Napoleon fell into convulsions that the doctor promised weren’t physical and Gaby woke drowning in grief and with her lungs crushed by terror, there were ten days when Illya, along with work, occupied their time so completely that they were almost able to forget about their demons.

Illya and work—sometimes Gaby considered them one and the same, and she felt awful about it every time, but the life she had wasn’t the life she’d imagined. She’d never wanted to take care of anyone when she was young. 

_Life marches on, things change._

Gaby yawned and went over to what was left of the dinner table and perched on one of the mismatched bar stools she and Napoleon had found at a garage sale when they realized there were no actual chairs left in the house.

(“These won’t last long either,” Napoleon had muttered darkly, “so it doesn’t matter how damned _ugly_ they are.”)

“What are you making?” she asked, regretting that she hadn’t brought down the file still in her room, the op that Waverly had sent for her—and Napoleon, technically—to consult on.

“Omelettes,” Napoleon muttered. “Back to basics. Illya likes them.”

Gaby nodded and decided not to ask how Napoleon could possibly have figured that out, given that Illya seemed to have absolutely no opinion on any dish Napoleon made, which meant Napoleon was either seeing what he wanted to see or picking up on subtleties that Gaby hadn’t, given that she wasn’t a “master of human character”. She felt a little bitter about it sometimes, that Napoleon seemed to understand Illya better than she did. It hadn't been like that before, but before felt like a fever dream sometimes.

She watched Napoleon cook until he was done, watched him set three places at the table, or try to, with half the table held up by splintered wood and a prayer. It was just so damn big that it seemed a waste to throw it away. They tended to forget to discard things anyway, so used to having all that debris around.

Gaby was about to ask Napoleon if they ought to wake Illya up or just let him rest when Illya appeared in the threshold as if Gaby’s thoughts had summoned him, hovering warily.

He looked…normal, really. Like himself, in sweatpants and an undershirt, his back tense, his eyes clouded with a million warring emotions that when combined were nearly delirium, his hair soft and ruffled, dark circles under his eyes. (But they all had those.)

“Last night,” he started, and then he trailed off, brow furrowing as though he’d forgotten what he was going to say. He probably had. The doctor at HQ had said he was lucky not to be a vegetable, after what he'd been through, and it had to leave its mark somehow. “Last night,” he said again, mostly under his breath, his fingers starting to tap against the side of his leg.

“It was fine,” Gaby said hastily. “You had to get it out of your system.”

She didn’t say what _it_ was, given that she didn’t know, and hoped that Illya’s mind would fill the answer in for him.

 _Let him be all right today,_ she prayed to every single deity she didn’t believe in, which was all of them. _Just let things be all right today. Even if it’s just because he’s tired from yesterday, give us a break._

Illya blinked, and then nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said.

“Come eat,” Gaby said, waving him over. She didn’t mean to smile, but she did anyway.

Illya did, picking at the omelette with little enthusiasm as Napoleon and Gaby both ate with far more gusto than they would’ve had he not been there. He did eat it, though. 

He was good about eating. It was one of those things that he’d just do.

After breakfast, Napoleon started on dinner—lunch was always sandwiches—and Illya wandered over to his chess set and Gaby went upstairs to get her work, walking through the plaster ground into the carpet and picking up the file she’d dropped when she’d run from her bedroom into the downstairs bathroom that they always shut themselves in when it wasn't advisable to try and even be within five feet of Illya. It was something of a panic room, though it was also thoroughly trashed.

(A few weeks back, Gaby was in the bathroom at HQ, fixing her hair, and her reflection gave her pause, because she didn’t look like herself at all. For a horrible moment, her throat started to close, but she was able to catch her breath when she realized that it wasn't a stranger staring back at her, she just didn't recognize herself in an unbroken mirror.)

Gaby brushed the file off, tucked it under her arm, and then considered whether she wanted to change her clothes or not.

She didn’t have that kind of energy, she decided, especially when there was no one to dress for, so she just closed her door gently behind her and made her way back downstairs, avoiding the hole in the middle of the hardwood flooring of the stairwell without even thinking, she was so used to stepping around broken things.

She took her file into the living room where Illya was poring over his chess set, muttering to himself in Russian. She’d asked Napoleon what he was saying before, because it all sounded like nonsense to her, and Napoleon had shrugged and said that actually, she wasn’t far off. It was, in fact, effectively nonsense, but in Russian.

When Illya was having a chess kind of day, a day that wasn't good or bad, it was almost possible to forget he was even there. He could stay sat on the hardwood floor for hours, contemplating his chess set, which was perched on an ottoman in a relatively untouched corner of the living room, playing through the same game over and over again. She didn’t bother him until it was time to eat, and then she didn’t bother him when he went back to the game immediately after they were done with dinner. Napoleon did, though, no longer preoccupied with his cooking.

He sat on the side of Illya’s chess set that Illya himself wasn’t occupying and said, like he always did when Illya got into one of his chess ruts, “Wanna play a real game?”

Illya nodded, which was getting to be less and less unusual, and so the day ended like that, with Gaby poring over her file and Illya and Napoleon playing chess.

That night, Gaby slept with Illya because Napoleon had done it the night before and she liked it, actually, sleeping with him. She wasn’t stupid enough to trust him not to hurt her, but she liked having him close, just as she had the first night he had insisted—while on very strong painkillers, of course—that she or Napoleon stay with him because he didn’t want to be alone. Fair enough. As bad as Illya could get when he was with them, he was always worse when he was off on his own.

So she curled up against Illya, wrapped herself around him as best as she could considering how much bigger he was than her, and pressed her ear against his chest. She felt the frantic thump-thump-thump of his heart reverberating through her whole body, and drifted off to sleep as it fell back into a steady beat. 

He woke her in the middle of the night when he started to struggle, his chest heaving, and she tried to move away, to scramble from the bed like she always did if there was any threat of Illya having some sort of terror, but she was too late. He grabbed her arm and she was left in an uncomfortable position not quite lying down and not quite sitting, half on top of him. His hand tightened on her arm, and she welcomed the bruise it’d leave.

She barely took a breath as she stared down at him, the look in her eyes probably warier than she wanted it to be, but she comforted herself as she always did, with the knowledge that even though he was staring back at her, he probably wasn’t all too focused on her expression. He was wild-eyed but unmoving, not fighting, and she started to think that it wasn’t wishful thinking to assume that this could all end well, especially after they’d had such a, well, all right kind of day.

She couldn’t say why he had that habit of just looking at her or Napoleon sometimes, or maybe she just didn’t want to know, but his eerie calm was better than fighting and screaming and snarling.

She kept her voice measured when she said, “It’s fine, you're fine. You’re just tired, is all. Go back to sleep.”

Her heart had climbed its way up her throat, but she swallowed it down, stayed steady—when she got afraid, so did Illya, and she wasn’t in a good position for Illya to be afraid—and his breath deepened, though it still shook. His hand on her arm went slack and recognition flickered in his eyes.

“Gaby?” he asked, as wary of her as she was of him just a minute back.

“Only one of two people I could be,” she said. “And tonight you've got me.”

“Were not here,” he mumbled, his fingers twitching against her skin. His hand trailed down her arm, and the lack of pressure just made it ache more, but she got herself into a more comfortable position, lying down again, settled against his body with her face half-buried in his neck and her hand resting lightly on his shoulder.

“Illya,” she whispered against his clammy skin. “Illya. No matter where I wasn't, I'm here now. We're here. You’re home. For what it’s worth, we’re home.”


End file.
